Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology is common today in larger medical institutions worldwide, and has led to huge benefits in the practice of medicine. A significant factor impeding further increased use of this versatile imaging technology is the typically high cost of both purchase and maintenance of MRI systems. The costs associated with the design and manufacture of such systems are due mainly to the need to generate large and very homogeneous static magnetic fields, as well as the need to generate gradient fields for imaging with such systems. Such large static fields are currently required to obtain high image quality and resolution. Some attempts have been made to improve costs by more efficient image processing. For example, several methods of normalizing raw MRI images are well-known in the literature and described for example in N. B. Konyer et al., “Improved Interstial and Intravascular RF Coils”, Proceedings, Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. (ISMRM) 10, page 2262, 2002, and in H. Mihara et al., “A method of RF inhomogeneity correction in MR imaging”, Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine (MAGMA) 7, pp. 115-120, 1998. As is clear from these references, such normalization is based on the spatial distribution of the receive coil sensitivity profile (examples of which are shown in the above references) with respect to its own reference frame.